The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The phrase “cloud computing” refers to an architectural paradigm, in which computation is moved from local servers to a remote service that provides computation as a commodity or utility. A “cloud” is typically a large collection of shared commodity computation resources that can be interchangeably provisioned in response to clients' computation requests. Cloud computing is frequently used in software-as-a-service (SaaS) application architectures and may be viewed as an implementation choice for application deployment that leverages shared resources and improved cost structure of the cloud.
A cloud computing approach may be used to implement a variety of computational paradigms, such as virtual machines, jobs, remote procedure calls, traditional servers, etc. A computing application executing on a virtual instance of a machine running within a public virtualization space, such as, e.g., the virtualization space provided by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, may be referred to as running on a cloud.
The proliferation of mobile devices—including super smart phones, netbooks, and tablets—presents new challenges for software development. These devices have limited screen size, limited processing and memory resources, as well as limited power.